Re: SD5 - Namespaces

On 23 May 1997, Peter Flynn wrote:

> Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. (William of Occam)
> 
> Can't we just use CONCUR syntax? Parsers already have code to handle it
> and isn't this just really CONCUR in disguise?
> 
> <(CML)VAR foo=bar>blort</(CML)VAR>
> <(MathML)FRAC>99<(MathML)OVER/>100</(MathML)FRAC>

The problem with CONCUR syntax is SGML validation, where the concurrent
DTDs are applied to the entirety of the document. (-sigh-. Otherwise this
was indeed a no-brainer.)

Nevertheless, the purely technical requirement seems to be just the
ability to qualify names (with other names.) I'm still not comfortable
with the suggestion to add ':' to the set of name characters -- for
instance, what happens when there's a colon in the name of an attribute?

As a counter-proposal, how about adding a character to the LCNMSTRT and
UCNMSTRT sets? For instance, '_'. Now any element name beginning with this
character can by convention be interpreted as "namespace-qualified" where
the namespace(s) are in some attribute value -- with a special attribute
name: "_"!

Just a thought.


Arjun

Received on Thursday, 22 May 1997 22:19:36 UTC